The lack of interoperability is considered as the most important barrier to achieve the global integration of IoT ecosystems across borders of different disciplines, vendors and standards. Indeed, the current IoT landscape consists of a large set of isolated islands that do not constitute a real internet, preventing the exploitation of the huge potential expected by ICT visionaries.

VICINITY will build and demonstrate a device and standard agnostic platform for IoT infrastructures that will offer “Interoperability as a Service”. It will rely on a decentralised and user-centric approach that offer a complete transparency across vertical domains while retaining full control of the ownership and distribution of data.

Storages are unavoidable components of the future smart grid with large share of variable renewable generation. However, the unit-cost of energy, that is retrieved from storages, is several times higher than the cost of energy consumed upon its output from renewable sources. Therefore, there is a strong requirement on the optimisation of storage capacities deployed in the grid. This is especially true for the small energy sites such as distributed renewables and prosumers’ microgrids which are the segments, targeted by the SHAR-Q bottom-up concept. The principal objective of the SHAR-Q is to optimize the storage capacities deployed in the grid with the help of a peer-to-peer interoperability network that connects neighbouring renewable+storage ecosystems into a collaboration framework. Thus, the optimization of storage capacities can be achieved through their sharing among the participating actors. To get connected to the SHAR-Q network, an open interoperability gateway with semantic interface descriptors will be provided that will be based on the most adopted standards in the field. Moreover, the users will be provided with an ability to manage their contribution to the collaborative models on their own in a way that resembles the well-known social web portals (e.g. users can control with whom they wish to share specific storage capacities).